By: Jon Roberts, Principal & Managing Director, TIP Strategies
March 11, 2014, marked the last day of this year’s SXSW Interactive. Austin’s premier tech event has grown steadily since its inception in 1994. One notable mark of its reach, that may be overlooked by the standard measure of badges sold and tourism dollars generated, is the heightened presence of economic development organizations at the festival.
The industry’s interest in SXSW was apparent from the number of US states and cities, as well as foreign cities, regions, and countries, that set up shop at SXSW, all vying for one of the most desired of economic development targets: tech start-ups and young entrepreneurs. No doubt about it, this tactic represents a sea change in what counts as credible economic development. Where in the past the profession’s holy grail was the relocation of a major manufacturing company, we now see a shift to technology and high growth start-ups (though manufacturing is still seen as the primary objective in many parts of the US). We’ll leave for another time a more thorough discussion of how successful these efforts are. (The short answer: it varies widely.) At one end of the scale is the possibility that bringing companies to SXSW will only speed their exodus from less tech-savvy regions to (you guessed it) Austin. At the other end is the ability to connect with and recruit entrepreneurs to new markets. My panel, “Start-up Grind: What Makes Austin a Startup Hub,” touched on these issues, as well as the question of what made Austin successful in the tech space.
Clearly, industry recruitment and expansion is not the stated objective of SXSW Interactive, nor is it likely to be the primary draw for most participants. As suggested by their mission statement—encapsulated in three values: creativity, innovation and inspiration—SXSW Interactive is about stepping outside your intellectual comfort zone. At a minimum, spending time in the presence of so many creative companies and individuals gives you an opportunity to rethink assumptions behind your business—even, and especially, at a fundamental level. From an economic development perspective, for example, this rethinking of assumptions raises the question of whether measuring success by jobs created is the best way to grow our economy. Abandoning this gold standard is, in some ways, analogous to growing a business without worrying about profitability. It’s a radical notion, and one that, on the face of it, makes no sense. Just don’t tell that to Amazon or to Facebook.
But testing one’s assumptions is not the whole of the SXSW experience. The real power of SXSW lies in what Tony Hsieh, of Zappos fame, calls collisions—connections that occur spontaneously and bring together individuals and companies that might never have connected before. The sheer number and variety of panels, speakers, and registrants makes this goal relatively easy to accomplish. It can be as simple as colliding with the AT&T team during the Ping-Pong tournament (and, in my case, losing to them) then learning what AT&T is doing, what their talent strategy is, and what their new product line will look like. If I’m busy “recruiting companies,” I miss out on these chance encounters; my agenda gets in the way of making real connections. Sometimes an indirect approach is the surer path towards one’s goal.
And even if you weren’t able to experience the randomness of SXSW, you couldn’t fail to miss this year’s driving theme. It was already apparent on the first day and gathered steam throughout the event: Internet privacy. First Julian Assange, via Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, then Edward Snowden from an undisclosed location in Russia (routed through multiple ISPs). Whatever one’s political attitude towards Assange and Snowden, their message is coming through loud and clear and is being fully embraced by the tech crowd: privacy matters.
The question of Internet privacy has numerous dimensions. It is not exclusively governmental. It extends to transactional privacy with corporations and to the question of who owns our personal data (our Internet identity). The default answer should not be that this information is “owned” by corporations or the government (or health care providers). We—it is being argued—have an absolute right to our personal data and we ought not to be giving it up (or having it taken from us) without our informed consent. This, of course, is a discussion that requires a much larger platform. At a minimum, however, SXSW is signaling a shift in how we think about our use of the Internet. I’ll venture to say it signals a sea change, one whose implications may be profound.
Among the immediate insights that arise from taking a privacy perspective on data are the following:

Bitcoin is interesting far beyond its effects on financial institutions. The way to think about Bitcoin is as a means of ensuring transactional privacy. What could only be done with cash, can now be done electronically with the same advantages – and, as we have discovered, some of the same risks.

Our health records are ours, and do not belong to a health care system or the government. The realization that our health records tell our personal story and that their ultimate value belongs to us and needs to be managed by us is still a startling fact.

Every online transaction, from simple browsing to Internet (and credit card) purchases, reveals information about us that we have the right to control. Commercial transactions, by definition, are between at least two parties. E-commerce exponentially increases the parties involved in each transaction. Data collected during the initial transaction becomes a commodity in itself, which can be shared and sold many times over. Whether we explicitly agree to this extension of our transactions or not, we are entitled to know which of our data is kept and how it is being used.

These points—and many more like them—could have enormous business and social implications. It is immediately apparent that they relate to one another and foreshadow a changing relationship to the data and metadata that increasingly define who we are. In fact, we can expect to see a new wave of disruptive technologies related to managing our on-line activity. We are already beginning to note distinctions where before there were none: distinctions, for example, between privacy and security, and what it means to own our digital identity. Add in social media (in its multiplicity of forms), and every on-line activity is subject to a major re-thinking.
SXSW has a way of making small ideas very big. This was true of Twitter, and it may be true of a new wave of privacy-related companies. Stay tuned.

SWSX Interactive’s little sister, SXSWedu, raised many of the same issues. Not so much privacy, although that was discussed, but that in the very near term (a few years or less) much of the “digital curricula” will owe more to Pixar and Electronic Arts (animation and video games) than to Houghton Mifflin (major book publisher). Austin, with initiatives in film and video gaming, and the gigafication coming with Google Fiber and its competitors, is well positioned to take a lead in both production and consumption of these items. Where is your community in this space?